Photo by Brian Howell

Brian Howell began photographing the interiors of abandoned houses three years ago when he noticed that the classic suburban homes of Surrey, B.C., the split-levels and the ranch homes, with their big garages, big picture windows and big backyards were, in his words, starting to slide away from the landscape. Houses like those he had grown up in had turned into white elephants, empty shells abandoned on crescents, cul-de-sacs and long curving driveways, awaiting obliteration by bulldozer. The dream of the white middle class, of a life free of the noxious city, entirely automotive and upwardly mobile, has been erased by the urbanization of the suburbs now underway across North America: row housing, miles of condominium estates, large immigrant populations, mini-town centres, etc.

Once emptied of their occupants, these structures (no longer "homes," or even "houses") fall swiftly into decay. Doors and windows disappear, leaving gaping holes through which one can glimpse the ghosts of living rooms, rec rooms, kitchens, the double garage, the indoor swimming pool, children’s bedrooms and "master" bedrooms—and scattered everywhere the litter of lifestyles also abandoned: double-wide stoves, refrigerators, fat sofas, computers, toys, overturned dining tables. An air of disaster and flight hangs over vast yards littered with car seats, family photos, kitchen chairs, computer game bits, rotting food, laundry tubs, washing machines, hi-fi sets, lawnmowers, dolls, ping-pong tables, drug paraphernalia, rock posters, a complete set of language course materials: the detritus of a dream.

During the brief half-life between abandonment and obliteration (days, weeks, sometimes months at a time), these buildings take on new life as refuge for the homeless, for the drug-addicted and for teenagers looking for hangouts; a shadowy population moves in quietly and is gone just as quietly. Among them are scavengers seeking copper and other metals, and anything else that can be recycled for a bit of cash. The suburban home, always the emblem of the bland, the safe, the regular, becomes, however briefly, mysterious and interesting. When Howell took to entering these spooky demesnes with his camera, he was never sure what or who he would find within. He felt like an archaeologist stepping through ruins, and at the same time like a voyeur spying illicitly on the lives of others. As he photographed these desolate memory-sites, some of which had served as grow-ops as well as middle-class family homes, he was often made uneasy by the shadowy presence of strangers. One afternoon as he stood in what had once been a child’s bedroom, he could hear people outside smashing computer monitors on the driveway. On other days he encountered drug dealers, wire strippers, and once a teenaged girl by a ruined swimming pool washing red paint from her hands: she had covered a bedroom wall with a radiating pattern of handprints.

Among the people that Howell encountered among the ruined houses of Surrey was Ed, a tall man with a big beard who was not offended when Howell said that he looked like Jesus Christ. Ed was planning to spend the winter in an abandoned cabin deep in the trees behind a row of flattened houses along Highway 10. He said that he had lived in the wilderness for eleven years, that he had fought packs of wild dogs and grizzly bears. His mother died when he was four. He was half Scottish and half First Nations. He showed Howell a field of grassy mounds that he said had been a First Nations burial ground a hundred years ago, and his favourite trees, a giant redwood and a Douglas fir. "All of these will be cut down soon," he said. He showed Howell an enormous anthill seething with ants. "They’ll bulldoze this too," he said. "They’ll bulldoze it so people can move in here and build their own anthills." From time to time Ed recited verses from the Bible. They went into a room that had been a child’s bedroom and, as Howell focussed his Hasselblad on the wallpaper, Ed told him that he had once stolen a bicycle on a cold night when he needed to get somewhere warm, but his conscience got the better of him and he returned it the next night. That was his whole life of crime.

The special responsibility of those who chose to live in suburbia was to be "happy": happiness was the point of suburbia, and its great moral burden. Suburbia was the modern Utopia, the embodiment of freedom for any who could afford it. But the dark side of Utopia belongs to the same age: the novels of John Updike trace the rise and fall of a way of life that reached its apogee in the sixties, when America’s great purpose was getting to the moon, and gasoline was 8 cents a litre. In these images we apprehend the afterlife of an evanescent world in its vanishing moments, and the photographs themselves become a species of haunting, a disturbing visitation from limbo.

These photographs were taken in Surrey, B.C., between 2005 and 2007. Surrey is one of the fastest growing cities in Canada. Its population increases by about 1,500 people per month.